Edinburgh can be a city for all writers

Soon the people will be gone. Flyers and old ticket stubs will whip up with the newly autumnal gusts that roll and rollick along empty George Street. The signs will fall at the Assembly Rooms, the Pleasance and the relocated Gilded Balloon. Lothian road will no longer become an uneasy mixture of Hoxton fins and Niddrie micro-minis at 2am.

The change will pass unnoticed across most of Scotland, but in Edinburgh it will arrive like a black dog loping down Shandwick Place, ushering the festival out of town.

For those of us who live in the capital, it means some curious adjustments. Neighbours will disappear without notice. No longer will the close be filled with the sound of eager young thespians prancing about in Little Bo Peep outfits. Nor will hungover comics shout for midnight taxis; they will take their mangy hair and go. The students will return.

In Charlotte Square, the tents will come down, leaving the grass resembling a used Test wicket. This has been the best festival I can remember, not just at the book festival which has seen ticket sales rise by 10 per cent, but across all the festivals.

Young Adam, David MacKenzie's film of Alexander Trocchi's novel, opened the Film Festival; Scottish Opera triumphed with its complete Ring Cycle. Our playwrights did us proud with new dramas at the Traverse by Henry Adams, Gregory Burke and David Harrower.

What has been peculiar this year is the lack of controversy. The first festival I spent any time at was in 1991. Then a siege was underway at the White House in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin was standing on top of a tank, and the Kirov ballet negotiated armoured vehicles on Moscow runway to reach Edinburgh. Closer to home a fight had developed between the International Festival and the Fringe, with stand-up rows taking place in the courtyard of the old Traverse in the Grassmarket, although it's hard to recall what it was all about.

Now the festivals work together, helping to promote each other, while still feeling remarkably separate. The comedians drink in the Assembly Rooms, the novelists at the book festival. The theatre people are at the Traverse and the film people are in some delegate centre. The telly people are at the George Hotel, although you'd never know they're there.

Fifty years ago, Gore Vidal wrote a pessimistic note on the future of the novel, blaming the new technology for its forthcoming demise: 'Appalling education combined with clever new toys has distracted that large public which found pleasure in prose fiction.' As this year's festival proves, he was wrong. Among all these proponents of modern technology, the novel has survived and proved itself central, the lodestar of storytelling.

I'm biased, of course - I write novels - but the book festival is already illustrating the point. So far this year, the film director John Boorman, the television writers Andrew Davies and Alan Plater, and the comedian Rich Hall have all appeared in Charlotte Square. They came to discuss their books, which they will have written because, unlike all the other disciplines, there is only an editor between their work and their audience.

The film people in particular find this difficult to understand. With a self-belief that radiates from the little red FilmFour necklaces they wear not just at the delegate centre but across the city, executives see the story as something to be savaged. Stories get chewed over by a whole line of people whose jobs, often paid for by taxpayers, depend on saying no.

There has been a push of late by, among others, Catherine Lockerbie at the Book Festival and Mark Lambert at the Scottish Book Trust, to have Unesco recognise Edinburgh as a World City of Literature. News of this seeped out before the organisers would have wished it, and was met by suspicion and ridicule by cities such as Dublin and London.

To give it the power that would drive the sneers from the faces of its critics, its organisers should head right at the heart of storytelling. For the past month, Edinburgh has hosted the best writers in the world, from across all the disciplines. There is a tendency for these writers to become ghettoised, to tell their stories in the form they know best, and not necessarily the form that is best for the story itself. Perhaps Edinburgh, as a City of Literature, would have the opportunity to break this down.

In his essay, Vidal said that the novelist was about to join the poet in exile: 'It is clear that the novel, despite its glories, was surrogate only to the drama.' He was wrong, and Edinburgh must fight to prove it. The writers need to be brought together from across the festivals, the possibilities in telling stories discussed, be it in books, films, plays, television, librettos, or even computer games. To be a City of Literature, Edinburgh needs to grab at this unique opportunity it has to be a champion for all writing.

· Ruaridh Nicoll is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival tomorrow, Monday 25 August, at 10.30am. Tickets: £7